Rotisserie Chicken

Round and round and round she goes. Well, after a bit of nudging and a good whack, anyway.

Our grill also has a rotisserie function. Simply slide the bird on to the stick thingie and shove it into the doohickey and turn in on and magically it starts to spin. Technical terms for these particular devices are foreign to me. The grill is a hand-me-down and surprisingly still works even though it looks like it is falling apart. I don’t know if it could take another move.

Anyway, we had gorgeous I-don’t-want-to-cook-inside weather yesterday and I took advantage of that by thawing out a whole chicken I bought weeks ago and put in the freezer just for a day like this. After patting the chicken dry with a paper towel, I rubbed some herbed butter (with some fresh sage, rosemary, oregano and thyme from the garden, along with salt and pepper) under the skin and inside the cavity. After carefully inserting the rotisserie spit and claw things and tightening the clamps, I put it on the preheated grill, plugged in the spinner thing and watched as it did nothing. I detached the chicken, whacked the device against the edge of the grill and the turning mechanism started moving again. I placed a broiler pan directly underneath to not only prevent flare-ups, but also to fill with beer. We had a bottle of an IPA that neither of us planned on drinking, so we poured it into the pan along with a glass of water and kept filling it with more water for the hour and ten minutes we had it on the grill.

While the chicken was resting, I microwaved some potatoes and put a salad together using leftover salad from the church potluck earlier in the day that was looking for a home other than the trash. There were so many flavors in the salad, I figured nothing more than a little extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar would be needed. So after twenty minutes of letting the chicken rest, it was time to cut into it and find out if she was still moist or if I had overcooked the bird. You see, I am notorious for undercooking whole birds. I just bad at it. So for this one, I let it cook for probably a good fifteen minutes longer than it needed to. Hopefully the beer and water sauna it was cooking in made its way into the meat. It did. And it was amazing. Now I have a use for an India Pale Ale next time one randomly ends up in our fridge!